Problematic Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations of Modern GnosticismAuthor(s): Robert GalbreathSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 20-36Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202157Accessed: 11/05/2009 16:26

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Problematic Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations of Modern Gnosticism* Robert Galbreath / University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee

In the history of philosophy are doctrines, probably false, that exercise an obscure charm on human imagination: the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrine of the transmutation of the soul through many bodies, the Gnostic doctrine that the world was created by a hostile or rudimentary god.'

That gnosticism exercises an "obscure charm" on the modern imagina- tion, as Borges aptly puts it, can scarcely be doubted; that the fascination rests primarily on the idea of a world fabricated by a hostile deity is less apparent. Cosmic estrangement, as Hans Jonas has argued,2 seems to be a necessary condition for the emergence of gnostic thought, but it does not constitute a sufficient explanation of its alleged manifestations today.3 Although a less common term than "apocalyptic" or "utopian," "gnostic" has like them attained a certain prominence in the vocabularies of cultural and literary criticism and moral judgment. As an attitude or mode of thought, modern

*An earlier version of this paper, with the title "Modern Gnosticism: The Persistence of Myth," was read at the International Conference on Gnosticism, Yale University, March 28-31, 1978.

'Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (1964; reprint ed., New York: Simon & Schuster, n.d.), p. 37.

2HansJonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 322-31, 338-40. 3Throughout this paper, I distinguish (although the sources I quote may not) between

"Gnosticism" and "gnosticism." Capitalized, the term refers to particular currents of thought, visionary experience, and mythopoesis of the second and third centuries A.D. which Jonas (p. 32) characterizes as constituting a "dualistic transcendent religion of salvation" based on the attain- ment of saving knowledge (gnosis). Uncapitalized, the term refers to modern or universal

? 1981 by The University of Chicago. 0022-4189/81/6101-0002$01.00.

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gnosticism is said to be found in existentialist nihilism, in mass political movements, in significant currents of Romantic and Modernist literature, and in the quest for enlightenment. At the 1978 International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale, three of the four keynote speakers (among them, Harold Bloom) addressed themselves to modern gnosticism and found it nearly everywhere-Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Jung, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, et al. Another conference, on Gnosticism and Modernity, organized by disciples of the historian and political theorist Eric Voegelin, was held the same year at Vanderbilt.4

The proliferation of studies which purport to uncover gnosticism in the intellectual and institutional structures of the past 100 years prompted Altizer to comment as long ago as 1962 that "there is a sense" in which one can finally say, "Modern Gnosticism is simply modern experience, and a catalogue of the role of Gnosticism (as here defined) in our world would involve modern life and thought in its entirety."5 Altizer's conclusion seems inescapable if one combines the two most familiar analyses of modern gnosticism, Jonas's discussion of parallels between ancient Gnostic and modern existentialist modes of alienation and Voegelin's argument for the gnostic nature of"progres- sivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism."6 Whatever the charms of so protean a term, the obscurity is undeniable. One is in fact tempted to replace "gnostic" with "gnosticoid," van Baaren's tongue-in-cheek neologism which, he

manifestations of value structures and concepts which significantly parallel those of ancient Gnosticism, without necessarily imputing or implying historical connection, either as survival or as revival (cf. "Documente finale" in Le origini dello gnosticismo, ed. Ugo Bianchi [1967; reprint ed., Leiden: Brill, 1970], p. xxvi). "Gnosis" refers to both the concept and the experience of saving knowledge, whether in ancient or modern contexts.

4Selected proceedings of the Yale conference are to be published as a supplement to Numen and those of the Vanderbilt conference by Louisiana State University Press. One of the Vander- bilt papers has.been published separately: Gerhart Niemeyer, "Loss of Reality: Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism," Modern Age 22 (Fall 1978): 338-45. Harold Bloom's approach to modern gnosticism can be examined by his Poetry and Repression (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 11-16 (general), 208-34 (Yeats). Since the Yale conference, he has published a gnostic novel, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), and his critical work, An American Gnosis (New York: Seahurv Press), at this writing is scheduled for summer 1980 publication.

5Thomas J. J. Altizer, "The Challenge of Modern Gnosticism," Journal of Bible and Religion 30 (anuary 1962): 21-22.

6Jonas, pp. 320-40; Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1968), p. 83.

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says, is "quite frankly a word to hide our ignorance whether something is gnostic or not."'

In this context, the "problematic gnosis" of my title intentionally carries a double reference. It refers, first of all, in a general sense to the problematic status of "modern gnosticism" as an interpretative framework for understanding modern intellectual history. If it has, or can be made to have, any cogency, modern gnosticism clearly cannot serve as a synonym for the whole of modern thought. The senses in which it is either useful or accurate to speak of the gnostic nature of, or gnostic tendencies in, existentialism, nazism, cosmology, post- modernism, occultism, or literary theory need to be specified.8 The specificity must refer to features which are contextually significant and which continuously inform the text, movement, or phenomenon in question. Such features naturally must parallel or be derived from the major structures (usually binary) of traditional Gnostic thought: the radical dualism of matter and spirit, light and darkness, good and evil; the opposition between this-worldly imprisonment and other- worldly salvation; the linking of psychology, ontology, and soteriology in the paired categories of sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, ignorance/knowledge (gnosis). Failure to observe the criterion of structural parallelism (not to speak of historical accuracy) vitiates, for example, Voegelin's contention that the "gnostic attitude" includes the belief that the wretched condition of the world will evolve historically through human action into a better condition, a thesis which miscon- strues or ignores the antihistorical, atemporal, nonmeliorative character of Gnosticism.9 A related failure is the tendency of some writers to indulge in what Fischer has called the "fallacy of the perfect analogy," the erroneous inference from "a partial resemblance between two entities . . . to the false conclusion that they are the same in all respects."10 Thus, the statement in Time that Gnosticism surfaces

7Th. P. van Baaren, "Towards a Definition of Gnosticism," in Bianchi, ed., p. 177. 8Some representative works include Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich,

trans. Lewis A. M. Sumberg (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1974); Scott Charles Croft, "The Gnostic Imagination" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1976), pp. 59-154; Josephine Campbell Donovan, "Gnosticism in Modern Literature: A Study of Selected Works of Camus, Sartre, Hesse and Kafka" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1971); Maurice Friedman, To Deny Our Nothingness: Contemporary Images of Modern Man (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), pp. 135-87 (Weil,Jung, Hesse); Ihab Hassan, "The New Gnosticism: Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind," in Paracriticisms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), pp. 121-47; Raymond Ruyer, La Gnose de Princeton. Des savants a la recherche d'une religion (Paris: Fayard, 1974).

9Voegelin, pp. 86-88. 'lDavid Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York:

Harper & Row, 1970), p. 247.

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today in "such classics of existentialist despair" as Camus's The Stranger rests on the unproven assumptions that existentialism and Gnosticism are sufficiently defined by despair, that the despair is identical in both, and, for that matter, that The Stranger is in fact a novel of existentialist despair.11 A similar example is the familiar practice of describing the modern literature of alienation as ipso facto gnostic, as though "alienation" possesses an invariant meaning, regardless of cultural context. The presence of a single feature, extracted from its traditional framework, is insufficient justification for classifying any cultural phenomenon as "gnostic."12

The problematic nature of modern gnosticism involves more, however, than a conceptual imperialism, intentional or not, arising from linguistic imprecision and fallacious analogies. Nor is it set right by a rigid insistence that modern gnosticism, to be worthy of the name, must adhere to its presumed prototype in every detail. The far more interesting problem concerns the ways in which recognizably Gnostic structures function in modern contexts to produce conclusions and perspectives that diverge markedly from those of early Gnosti- cism. The heuristic value of modern gnosticism as an interpretative category must lie in its ability to identify both the significantly Gnostic and the characteristically modern qualities of its referents. As a specific case in point, I wish to devote the remainder of this paper to a consid- eration of the role of gnosis itself- the concept and the experience of saving knowledge-in modern gnostic texts. It is my contention that gnosis enjoys a problematic status in these works - hence, the second and more specific meaning of "problematic gnosis"-and that the uncertainty and ambiguity with which it is imbued constitutes its distinctively modern quality.

I have selected three twentieth-century novels for analysis, Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919), Isaac Bashevis Singer's Satin in Goray (1955), and Doris Lessing's Briefingfor a Descent into Hell (1971). All three are significantly gnostic in the sense that they are centrally concerned with gnosis as the awakening to or remembering of saving

""The World-Haters," Time (June 9, 1975), pp. 46-47. '2Altizer (pp. 19-20) is aware of the problems but does not altogether avoid them. Donovan's

"Gnosticism in Modern Literature" is explicitly concerned with alienation and gnosis, but still emphasizes the former at the expense of the latter and tends to identify gnosis with mysticism. See also Croft, passim; Bruce Henricksen, "Heart of Darkness and the Gnostic Myth," Mosaic 11 (Summer 1978): 35; Voegelin, p. 9. A reading ofJonas's discussion of alienation in Gnostic texts (pp. 49-51, 65, 68-69. 76, 78-79) indicates that it is in fact a highly ambiguous concept, so much so that it is difficult to determine whether alienation is the condition, the content, or the consequence of gnosis. It is certainly an elusive characteristic on which to pin definitions of modern gnosticism.

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knowledge and in the further sense that they treat gnosis as a component of the binary structures typical of traditional Gnostic thought. Only Demian, admittedly, refers to Gnosticism explicitly. But Satan in Goray draws heavily from Lurianic Kabbalism, which Scholem has shown to possess numerous and substantial parallels with Gnosti- cism, and Singer himself ascribes Gnostic origins to the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism.13 Briefing for a Descent into Hell is the most Gnostic of the three in its overall structure. It also makes considerable use of Gnostic features - the alien messenger, the prison house of existence, sleep and awakening as metaphors of the human condition-which Lessing may have derived from Idries Shah's Sufism, to which she is generally indebted and for which Shah claims Gnostic roots.14 Each of the novels is set in a period of historical crisis tantamount to the sense of cosmic estrangement of which Jonas speaks. Demian culminates in the apocalyptic bloodbath of World War I; Satan in Goray is situated in the Jewish communities of seventeenth-century Poland in the wake of the Chmielnicki massacres and the apocalyptic expectations of a new Messiah; Briefingfor a Descent into Hell reflects the late 1960s "bomb culture" and Aquarian consciousness, and its plot, on one level, contains the possibility of the imminent destruction of the earth. The fortunes of gnosis in these contexts of crisis, as we shall see, are of more than individual significance.

Although the novels are significantly gnostic, their tone and ambiance, as well as the conclusions which emerge from them, are quite different from those of early Gnosticism. These are, after all, works of the twentieth century. For them gnosis is problematic. All three fictions, as might be expected, rely heavily on dreams, visions, and myths in dealing with gnosis. But each also associates gnosis

"3Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3d rev. ed. (1954; reprint ed., New York: Schocken Books, 1961), pp. 117, 175 (early Kabbalism a Gnostic system), chap. 7, esp. pp. 267, 279-80 (Lurianic Kabbalism); and Kabbalah (1974; reprint ed., New York: Meridian Books, 1978), pp. 5, 74-76. For Singer, see "Interview," Inner Space 1 (November 1970): 8.

141 know of no evidence that Lessing is directly familiar with Gnosticism. On Sufism, see Nancy Shields Hardin, "Doris Lessing and the Sufi Way," Contemporary Literature 14 (Autumn 1973): 565-81; Idries Shah, The Sufis (1964; reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 29, 55, 419-20. Lessing quotes from the Sufi poet Rumi on sleep/awakening in her earlier novel, The Four-gated City (1969; reprint ed., New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 448. The sleep image for the condition of modern alienated man is also found in R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 24, a work which has long been considered a direct source for Lessing's novel. But Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 179, 196-97, n. 7, where Lessing is reported as saying that she had not read Laing at the time of writing the novel. On her general relationship to Laing's ideas, see Marion Vlastos, "Doris Lessing and R. D. Laing: Psychopolitics and Prophecy," Publications of the Modern Language Association ofAmerica (PMLA) 91 (March 1976): 245-58.

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with the possibility or actuality of mental disturbance, from severe emotional upset (Demian) to schizophrenia (Briefing) and possession (Satan in Goray). Each is also self-consciously aware of the demonic potential of gnosis; the titles alone give us "demon" (from "daimon," whence "Demian"), "Satan," and "Hell." Gnosis is presented as an experience or condition which cannot always be differentiated from or avoid falling into delusion, mental disorder, and the demonic. Far from being the self-authenticating experience it appears to be in traditional Gnosticism, gnosis enjoys no privileged status of impera- tive clarity in these modern fictions.

"Problematic gnosis" takes on additional meaning when it is viewed from the perspective of those interpretations of modern gnosticism which emphasize the immanentization and psychologization of the metaphysical framework of ancient Gnosticism. In his influential essay on "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism," Jonas writes that he was struck by the "reciprocal illumination" provided by his studies of Heideggerian philosophy and ancient Gnosticism, particularly with regard to their common sense of cosmic estrangement. Even so, he does not claim that existentialism and Gnosticism are identical in all respects or that the sense of cosmic estrangement is the same. The decisive difference is that the nihilism and alienation of Gnosticism were still located within a metaphysical framework which gave intrinsic meaning to the drama of cosmic conflict and ascribed divine origin and destiny to humanity. 5 Through gnosis the meaning of the alienated human condition and the process by which it could be transcended were revealed. Disorientating as the revelation of truth would no doubt be, it would also give new assurance and new direc- tion. Gnosis and alienation are inextricably coupled in a soteriology which insists on the existence of absolute truth and the possibility of knowing it. The very act of coming to know the truth effects an ontological transformation in the individual from a state of ignorance to one of saving knowledge (gnosis).16 Gnosticism thus insists on a

15Jonas, p. 335. It is questionable whether Jonas gives sufficient emphasis to the point (cf. Roland Crahay, "Elements d'une mythopee gnostique dans la Grece classique," in Bianchi, ed., pp. 323-25; and Edward Conze, "Buddhism and Gnosticism," in Bianchi, ed., p. 666, n. 3). Jonas also tends to equate "estrangement" and "alienation"; the former should not, therefore, be confused with "estrangement" as it is used by Brecht and recent critics of science fiction in the sense of "defamiliarization" (see Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979], pp. 3-15).

'6Jonas, pp. 34-35, 45, 68-73, 80-86; George MacRae, "Sleep and Awakening in Gnostic Texts," in Bianchi, ed., pp. 496-507; Mircea Eliade, "Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting," in Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 114-38, esp. pp. 126-34.

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series of correspondences between metaphysics, cosmology, episte- mology, and soteriology. Commentators on modern gnosticism, whatever their other differences, largely agree that in the post- Nietzschean world the radical dualism of traditional Gnosticism-the radical separation in origin and essence of humanity and the world, the world and God-has been displaced from the metaphysical to the immanent. In this view the death of God signifies that the dualistic opposition between humanity and an "indifferent" universe cannot originate in intrinsically opposed metaphysical principles of spirit and matter, good and evil, light and darkness. Instead, the polarization is said to be immanent within the historical process (Voegelin), the psyche (Jung, Quispel), or the human condition (onas). The Gnostic prison house is no longer the cosmos, the handiwork of an inimical demiurge; it is now our own minds, where the polar opposites func- tion as categories for states of consciousness and degrees of knowledge: ignorance/knowledge, sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, alienation/enlightenment (gnosis).

The psychological or subjectivist interpretation is by no means confined to modern forms of gnosticism, as readers of Jung, Quispel, and Grant know. Grant's conclusion that "the Gnostic approach to life is . . . a 'passionate subjectivity' which counts the world well lost for the sake of self-discovery" is applicable to ancient and modern gnosticism alike. 17 The psychological approach has the merit of calling attention to the centrality of self-recognition in gnosis, while simul- taneously suggesting the crucial point of difference between ancient and modern gnosis. In traditional Gnosticism, gnosis is recognition, not only linguistically but also literally: a regaining or relearning of knowledge once known but subsequently forgotten or repressed in the prison house of matter and flesh. It is self-knowledge of the self in its universal aspect, its origin and essence, its plight and purpose. Gnosis entails diagnosis and prognosis, but always within a metaphysical framework. Without this supporting framework, modern gnosis appears to be more aptly described as self-cognition, a knowing for the first time. In an immanent cosmos, there is no ontologically prior divine source to be known, no universal inner essence (pneuma) to do the knowing. What then is cognized in modern self-gnosis? In the

17Robert M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), p. 9. Cf. Bloom, Poetry and Repression (n. 4 above), p. 11; and the modern French gnostic, Jacques Lacarriere, The Gnostics, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), p. 128. See also Gilles Quispel, "Gnostic Man: The Doctrine of Basilides," The Mystic Vision, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, vol. 6 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 235-46.

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absence of metaphysical certainty, how can there be confidence in the authenticity of gnosis and the validity of its revelations? Can gnosis be distinguished from delusion, dream, and madness, or are these the forms gnosis now takes? These questions are consciously posed by Demian, Satan in Goray, and Briefingfor a Descent into Hell. 18

Demian, Hesse's first novel following his Jungian analysis in 1916-17, teems with Gnostic allusions. The most familiar are Demian's well-known reinterpretation of the Cain story (pp. 24-27; GD, pp. 124-28) and the god Abraxas, one of several symbols of the coincidentia oppositorum (pp. 76-78, 84, 93-94; GD, pp. 184-87, 194, 203-4). Ziolkowski notes that "an elaborate study could be written on Hesse's interest in Gnosticism and on the historical significance of Abraxas, of which Hesse was aware."'9 His Gnostic interests perhaps originated during his analysis with the Jungian Josef B. Lang (Pistorius in Demian). Jung remembered Lang as being "particularly interested in Gnostic speculation. He got from me a considerable amount of knowledge concerning Gnosticism which he also trans- mitted to Hesse. From this material he [Hesse] wrote his Demian."20 Quispel has speculated that Hesse derived his conception of Abraxas from Septem sermones ad mortuos, Jung's gnostic vision of 1916, which is written in the persona of Basilides and contains the same bipolar Abraxas. Neither this Abraxas nor the teachings of Jung's Basilides correspond, Quispel shows, to the teachings of the historical Basilides.21 But a recently discovered letter by Jung to Hesse in appreciation of Demian rather cryptically hints at a secret connection betweenJung and Demian: "I could tell you a little secret about Demian of which you became the witness, but whose meaning you have concealed from the reader and perhaps also from yourself." Little light has been shed on this statement so far, but the editors of Jung's correspondence believe, because of further comments in the same

'8Editions of the novels used are Demian, trans. Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck (1965; reprint ed., New York: Bantam Books, 1966) (German text in Hesse's Gesammelte Dichtungen, 6 vols. [Berlin and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1952], vol. 3 [cited as GD]; Satan in Goray, trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: Noonday Press, 1955); Briefingfor a Descent into Hell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971). Page references to these editions will be cited parenthetically in the text.

'9Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 110; Donovan (pp. 149-52, 177, 271-82) does not achieve this in her often inaccurate discussion of Demian.

20C. G. Jung, Letters, I: 1906-1950, ed. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 551-52 (letter to Emanuel Maier, March 24, 1950); Ziolkowski, p. 126.

21Gilles Quispel, "Hesse, Jung und die Gnosis: Die 'Septem Sermones ad Mortuos' und Basilides," in Gnostic Studies, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1975), 2:241-58, esp. pp. 241-43.

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letter, that Jung may have enclosed a copy of the Septem sermones with it. They also call attention to Jung's mandala painting of 1916, which contains the figures of Abraxas and a winged egg reminiscent of the symbolism in Demian (p. 76; GD, pp. 184-85).22 One wonders if Hesse had in fact seen either the painting or the manuscript of the Septem sermones before writing his novel.

Demian recounts the story of Emil Sinclair from the age of ten to about twenty, his coming into awareness of the conflicting worlds of light (his parents' home) and darkness (the outside world, danger, sex, the shadow), his increasing torment as he struggles to reconcile the opposites at war within himself, and his journey toward the Nietz- schean condition of existence beyond opposites. The goal is symbolized for Sinclair in his numerous dreams, his art, and his life by the successive images of Beatrice, Abraxas, and his friend Max Demian and Demian's mother Frau Eva. After a literally apocalyptic experi- ence on a Flemish battlefield during the First World War (pp. 138-39; GD, pp. 254-55), he achieves this state by discovering his friend, master, and savior Demian as his inner self (daimon). Overall, then, the story is not Gnostic. It moves through the Jungian archetypal realm, without portraying the external world as evil or inimical, although any deep affinity with it has been lost, and instead moves toward the position of accepting both good and evil as encompassed within the larger totality of the self. Moreover, Sinclair's apocalyptic rebirth is explicitly placed in an evolutionary, historical context in which the birth of a new humanity is also occurring (pp. 115-16, 122- 25, 131, 135, 138-39; GD, pp. 227-29, 236-39, 247, 250-51, 254-55).

Gnostic material is framed, therefore, by an antignostic evolu- tionary philosophy; yet it is significant that Hesse uses gnosticism at all and that he radically internalizes it into a psychological and spiritual quest. Hesse's comments on the Cain episode are revealing in this connection. As far as he knew, the Cain story in Demian was entirely his own creation, yet he later wrote to a correspondent, "I could well imagine that something similar might be found in the

22Jung, pp. 573-74 (letter to Hesse, December 3, 1919). See also C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (ed. AnielaJaffe, rev. ed. [New York: Vintage Books, 1965], pp. 189-91, 195), for his account of the writing of the Septem sermones (which are printed as app. 5, pp. 378-90) and his first mandala painting. During the International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale in 1978, Quispel's reproduction ofJung's mandala painting was on display in the Beinecke Library. The display card stated that it was painted after Jung completed the Septem sermones. The painting is reproduced in color as the frontispiece to Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2d ed. (Collected Works, vol. 9, pt. 1) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), and to his paperback collection from the same publisher, Mandala Symbolism (1972).

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Gnostics. What in those days was called theology is more like psycho- logy for men of today, but the basic truths are the same."23

One such "basic truth" for Hesse is the daimon, the higher self, which functions in Demian as the pneuma vis-a-vis the ordinary self (psyche). Max Demian, whatever his status as an independent person, is Sinclair's daimon; his face is timeless, androgynous, and daimonic (pp. 33, 43, 69-70, 103; GD, pp. 135, 146-47, 176-78, 215). It is Demian who tells him, "It's good to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves" (p. 72; GD, pp. 180-81), and it is Demian, whom Sinclair regards as friend, liberator, savior, and master (pp. 36, 141; GD, pp. 139, 257), who tells Sinclair at the end, "If you call me then I won't come crudely, on horseback or by train. You'll have to listen within yourself, then you will notice that I am within you" (p. 140; GD, p. 256). The daimon is the only god, the inner self. In Plato, the daimon is intermediate between man and the hidden gods,24 but for Hesse, the diamon is the hidden god, in the form of the potentially knowable inner self. The task is arduous and apparently undertaken only by an elite. In the final stage, it becomes an urgent matter of life and death: World War I, the death of Demian, the rebirth of Sinclair. The gnosis or recognition of the inner self is harsh; the price is great. With the next novel, the price is too great.

For Isaac Bashevis Singer, who believes in God as the universal plan and in the existence of demons and spirits,25 the higher powers do not reveal themselves easily either. But in his allegory of obsession and possession, the people of Goray are bemused by Messianic expectations and respond with fervent antinomianism. The controlling themes of their lives are homelessness and restoration, pollution and purification. Their physical existence is precarious in the aftermath of the 1648 massacres by the Ukrainian Cossacks. Their mental universe is their general sense, as Jews, of uprootedness and exile. It is rein- forced by the Lurianic Kabbalistic (Gnostic) doctrines of the unknow- able infinite (En-Sof), which contracts into itself to make room for

23Ziolkowski, p. 122. On Cain, seeJonas, pp. 94-96. 24See Plato Symposium 202D13-203A6, and discussion in E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in

an Age ofAnxiety (1965; reprinted., New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1970), p. 37. 25Interviews in Irving Malin, ed., Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: New York

University Press, 1969), pp. 22-23, 41-42. Singer's personal belief in transcendence does not invalidate the immanentist interpretation presented here. The point of the novel does not depend upon the actual existence of demons and angels, and the testimony of the only character in the novel to have intercourse with such beings cannot be relied upon and simply strengthens Singer's point about the delusional and psychotic tendencies of obsession.

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creation, and of the breaking of the vessels and the scattering of the divine light. There is also the superstitious dread of the dibbuk, the homeless or exiled soul of an unrighteous person which seeks victims to possess. But there is the additional sense that restoration of the light is possible, that it may be accelerated by the righteous person, and that it will be consummated by the Messiah, with whom the redemption of all things takes place. The 1648 massacres are interpreted kabbalistic- ally as the beginning of the final battle for redemption; the 1665-66 explosion of Sabbatian Messianism marks the coming of the final days; and Sabbatai Zevi's own antinomian behavior is widely accepted as exemplifying the right path for redeeming a polluted world.26

In Goray the people hunger for salvation and news of the Messiah. The Sabbatians soon dominate the community. Gnostic inversion of custom and law is openly performed. The town's obsession literally leads to possession. We are told that with the Sabbatians come "the others," that is, demons, who defeat the good rabbi and infect the populace (pp. 105, 114; cf. p. 90). The only individual in the story who may be said to experience a gnosis of sorts is possessed by a dibbuk and impregnated by Satan-or so she believes. This is Rechele, successively the wife of two leading Sabbatians. Her "call" comes from the Angel Sandalfon, lord of the seventh heaven in the Zohar and opponent of Samael (Satan), who reveals to her that her prayers "have penetrated the seven firmaments." She is to proclaim to the people that full redemption will come at the new year. The Angel also praises Reb Gedaliya, kabbalist and Sabbatian leader of Goray, as a "saintly" and "godly" man, "worthy, like Elijah, to behold the face of the Divine Presence" (pp. 154-55). But the "worthy" Reb Gedaliya is later denounced as a denier of the faith, an apostate, and even, for some, Samael (Satan) himself (pp. 227, 238).

Apostasy and demonism are linked in Rechele too. She is visited nightly by angels and prophets, among them Elijah, until news is received of Sabbatai's conversion to Islam. Those who remain faithful to Sabbatai Zevi divide themselves, much as in Jonas's account of Gnostic morality,27 between world-denying ascetics who believe that final redemption can come only when every individual is pure, and nihilistic libertines who believe that the last generation must be fully guilty before redemption can take place. It is the latter group that prevails in Goray. Upon hearing the news, Rechele begins to experi-

26Scholem (n. 13 above), chaps. 7-8, passim; Jacob Sloan, "Translator's Preface," Satan in Goray, pp. vii-xi.

27Jonas, pp. 46-47.

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ence struggles between "the Sacred and the Profane" (the title of chap. 11 in pt. 2) within herself, with the Profane growing ever stronger, until as Satan it rapes her. Her announcement that she is pregnant by Satan and carries a dibbuk within her awakens the townspeople to their condition. The narrative abruptly switches form in the final two chapters to that of a folktale which admonishes the people to return to God's ways. It recounts in gruesome detail the purification by exorcism of Rechele and the restoration of Goray to the right path. Pollution by the profane has been overcome. The tale's moral is that none should attempt to force the Lord, who will act in his own good time to send a Messiah and end the exile (p. 239). In Satan in Goray, the awakening is deceptive and the Messiah false. Gnostic Kabbalism, when carried to obsessive antinomian extremes, leads only to demonic possession, an allegorical conclusion about the nature of group obses- sions which may also apply for Singer to Nazi Germany and possibly to the witch-hunting trials of McCarthyism (recalling in this connec- tion another contemporary work, Arthur Miller's The Crucible [1953]), in progress when the novel was written.

The third novel I wish to discuss, Doris Lessing's Briefingfor a Descent into Hell, illustrates almost perfectly Jonas's description of the alien stranger (the Gnostic Messenger) who finds this world incompre- hensible:

Then it suffers the lot of the stranger who is lonely, unprotected, uncompre- hended, and uncomprehending in a situation full of danger. Anguish and homesickness are a part of the stranger's lot. The stranger who does not know the ways of the foreign land wanders about lost; if he learns its ways too well, he forgets that he is a stranger and gets lost in a different sense by succumbing to the lure of the alien world and becoming estranged from his own origin.... The recollection of his own alienness, the recognition of his place of exile for what it is, is the first step back, the awakened homesickness is the beginning of the return.28

So it is, on one level of this complex novel about illusion and reality, for Charles Watkins, professor of classics, mental patient, and--just possibly-Gnostic Messenger.29 Lessing skillfully employs alternating

28Ibid., pp. 49-50. 29The gnostic nature of the novel has not been noticed by most critics. Douglass Bolling does

refer to it once in his "Structure and Theme in Briefingfor a Descent into Hell" (Contemporary Literature 14 [Autumn 1973]: 556); and Mary Ann Singleton (The City and the Veld: The Fiction of Doris Lessing [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1977], pp. 144-56, 214-18) draws on alchemy, as well as Sufism, Jung, and Laing. To these Rubenstein adds the teachings of Gurdjieff in the best analysis of the novel to date (n. 14 above) (chap. 7).

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viewpoints to keep open the question of Watkins's "sanity" until the end of the book. Found wandering in an amnesiac state, Watkins is first seen through the hospital reports of Drs. X, Y, and Z and through his own fragmented fantasies of sailing Odysseus-like over a strange ocean. He is clearly disturbed. Then we are plunged into a lengthy, coherent, and absorbing first-person account by Watkins of his adven- tures upon landing on an unknown island. From a Jungian or Laingian perspective, his account holds the greatest interest, for it is apparent that his is a journey through the psyche, a self-healing journey which depends upon encountering repressed portions of himself. (In the introductory matter of the book, between the dedica- tion and epigraph pages, Lessing has inserted an additional page which reads: "Category: Inner-Space Fiction. For there is never anywhere to go but in.") When Watkins progresses to the requisite level of understanding, he is carried away by a crystal disc from the mandala-center of a deserted city and transported to a meeting of the Olympian gods. From their briefing report, we learn that the earth is moving into a severe crisis which can have disastrous cosmic conse- quences. But humanity, living in a poisoned atmosphere (both meteorological and mental), refuses to understand its plight. Mentally restricted by the religion of science, earthlings are oblivious to the cosmic harmony which they are disrupting. The danger requires the Olympians to attempt once more to send messengers down into the poisonous hell of earth to awaken some at least to the peril at hand and call them back to cosmic harmony. Yet the danger of the poisoned atmosphere is great; messengers may easily succumb to it, falling asleep and forgetting their origin and their assignment.

The reader is by now convinced that Watkins is one of these messengers. We see him next, in fact, as an infant, struggling to stay awake but eventually accepting the need to sleep to please his parents; then he appears as the hospital patient whose restlessness requires heavy sedation. Is he struggling toward gnosis (memory), or are his "memories" really drug-induced hallucinations? There follows a lengthy selection of letters from individuals who know him as Watkins-his wife, his mistress, friends, colleagues. Their accounts of his life shed new light. Some of his real-life activities now appear to be fabrications on his part, while some of his fantasies clearly have roots in real-life experiences. Doubts about his sanity briefly reassert them- selves. Yet one correspondent at least regards Watkins as enlightened and claims that she was "stung awake" by one of his lectures (p. 182). Perhaps then the discrepancies between the reports of others and his own are indicative, not of a mental problem, but of his honest struggle to extract higher truths and memories from the poisoned sleep that

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is his (and our) normal existence. Finally, with the reader now sharing Watkins's urgent sense that time is running out, Watkins risks electric shock treatment in the hope that he will fully remember. The outcome, not surprisingly, is that he is "cured," that is, he is restored to his old personality, his worrisome fantasies a thing of the past. He is normal, which is to say dull and, in effect, doomed (pp. 305-6). Lessing's message is clear: our "sanity" is really "insanity," and that which we diagnose as mental illness may represent true sanity. Watkins's final decision to rely on mechanistic science to achieve full consciousness is as fateful as it is expressive of the modern condition.

Lessing uses the Gnostic metaphors of sleep/waking and the prison house of existence effectively. Wakins is strongly aware that the unawakened life is like a prison: "it was a life so heavy and dismal and alien to me," he says during the island episode, "that to go to sleep was like entering a prison cell" (p. 69; cf. pp. 241-42). While drugged in the hospital and outwardly asleep, inwardly he is still fighting toward memory. When he is aroused from sedation, he can only tell the doctors that this is not really being awake at all-"Awake is asleep" (p. 165)-and that he has never slept less in his life (p. 68). But he must continually struggle against the drugs:

In mental hospitals where the millions who have cracked, making cracks where the light could shine through at last, the pills are like food pellets dropped into battery chickens' food hoppers, SLEEP, the needles slide into the outstretched arms, SLEEP, the rubber tubes strapped to arms drip, SLEEP.

SLEEP, for you are not yet dead. I must wake up. I have to wake up. [P. 154]

The role of the doctors reveals a startling reversal of Gnostic cosmology. The cosmos is not hostile or alien, but a harmony from which humanity has divorced itself. Gnosis is intended to bring humanity back into the cosmos, not help humanity to escape from it. The archons, therefore, are not the Olympian gods of the planetary spheres, but Drs. X, Y, and Z, who keep Watkins trapped in their prison-hospital with consciousness-lowering drugs and dehumanizing science. In Lessing's cautionary tale, gnosis has no chance at all.

Hesse, Singer, and Lessing have each explored a different aspect of gnosis in their novels, with different results. In Demian we see gnosis as the culmination of an arduous, painful growth toward awakening the pneuma, an eventuality which only a few can hope to realize. Satan in Goray depicts Gnostic cosmology and antinomianism as the framework for a false awakening, an obsession that becomes posses- sion. Emil Sinclair manages to find his path and his daimon; the

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villagers of Goray stray from the lawful path and find only demons. Briefingfor a Descent into Hell shows the plight of the Gnostic Messenger, struggling between sleep and waking, ultimately surrendering to forgetfulness. From the evidence of these fictions, gnosis is difficult to attain, its consequences are unforeseen and often undesirable, and its revealed "truths" may be highly ambivalent, so much so that delusion and enlightenment no longer seem self-evident opposites.

That the experience of gnosis is problematic in these texts under- scores the problematic status of the concept of modern gnosticism in contemporary historical and cultural analysis. Modern gnosticism cannot be defined usefully without specifying the components which constitute its modernity and its gnosticism. I have argued that the gnostic quality must encompass, parallel, or derive from the major structures of early Gnostic thought. It cannot isolate a single feature from the larger Gnostic context that includes its binary.30 Alienation without enlightenment, for example, is not gnostic, ancient or modern. This criterion alone invalidates or limits much that is written about modern gnosticism. But this is not to say that the alienation and the enlightenment of modern gnosticism must be identical with their prototypes of the second and third centuries. Modern gnosticism is not ancient Gnosticism in the twentieth century. The modernity of modern gnosticism is not a chronological property, but a function of the displacement of recognizably Gnostic structures from an ontology of metaphysical transcendence to a psychology of immanence, rela- tivity, and imputed rather than inherent meaning. It is not psychologi- zation per se that is distinctive of modern gnosticism, since the exploration of the psyche was explicitly a religious quest for some ancient Gnostics and a variety of modern thinkers since the Romantics have situated the drama of redemption in the imagination, uncon- scious, or psyche of the individual.31 The distinctive feature is instead the effect of the displacement upon the traditional Gnostic message. Without the supporting framework of a metaphysics, psychologized gnosticism loses its orientation. Gnosis itself is transformed from a condition of saving enlightenment to one of troubling uncertainty.

In this connection, Friedman is certainly correct in pointing out that a modern gnostic like Jung does not literally believe in the ancient Gnostic myths but interprets them instead as symbols of psychic

30Cf. van Baaren (n. 7 above), pp. 174-76. 31Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 122-23, 134-35;

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1971), pp. 117-22; Franklin L. Baumer, Religion and the Rise of Scepticism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1960), pp. 230-92.

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processes. Yet Friedman argues that Jung did believe in the validity of his own myth and its power to liberate and redeem the modern individual.32 The crucial point, however, is not that a modern gnostic may substitute a psychologized myth for a transcendental one, but rather the difficulty of establishing a basis for the validity of gnosis itself. Friedman does not allow for the possibility of problematic gnosis. His twofold classification of modern gnostics into those who follow a traditional Gnostic emphasis upon a hidden, transcendent God not connected to this world (Simone Weil, Nicolas Berdyaev) and those who replace the transcendent God with a more modern emphasis on the divinity found within the self (Jung, Hesse) fails to bring out that it is precisely the difficulty of knowing or finding transcendence and divinity which troubles them.33 The certainty that the self contains divinity or that self-knowledge is equivalent to knowledge of God (salvation) is itself in doubt. The equation is broken. The radical dualism of Gnosticism, when internalized, creates self-division and uncertainty. Nor does there seem to be confidence that a solution can be found. Of the three novels, only Demian approaches the question of divinity within the psyche. It is revealing that Hesse equates the hidden god within with the daimon in the literal sense of an inter- mediate being, at best a guiding genius or guardian angel, not a true deity; further, that the final revelation of the daimon must be legiti- mized by occurring within the context of an evolutionary, historical philosophy coupled with an apocalyptic vision of the birth of a new humanity. The validation of gnosis in this instance requires an appeal to historical and religious authority. That even Jung's considerable effort to place the individuation process, which he saw also as a redemptive process, on a nonsubjective basis has not won wide accept- ance simply reinforces the conclusion that gnosis as a psychological category of salvation has become in the modern context an object and a vehicle of uncertainty.

The oxymoron "problematic gnosis" does directly continue at least one traditional gnostic characteristic; reversal or inversion. The reversed meaning of gnosis in the modern context represented by the novels of Hesse, Singer, and Lessing parallels the Gnostic inversion of Christian and Jewish belief about the nature of the world and God. Jung introduces the Heraclitean term enantiodromia in his essay on "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man" to describe the modern turn away from the external world toward the unconscious and the psyche, a

32Friedman (n. 8 above), pp. 148, 152. 33Ibid., pp. 135-36, 146-47.

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development reflected by the interest in depth psychology and the popularity of occult currents which he associates with Gnosticism.34 By extension, this "conversion toward the opposite" may also cover the reversal of gnosis from certainty to uncertainty.

Although upon analysis modern gnosticism has proven to be an ambiguous concept, it is possible to see that an essential component of its modernity is the ambiguity of its gnosis. Green has argued the need for more precise definitions to guide motif studies of ancient Gnosticism;35 in the case of modern gnosticism, motif and thematic studies may help clarify the definition. In the texts examined here, the theme of problematic gnosis is crucial. Gnosis in effect becomes diagnosis. It is less a condition of saving knowledge than a modern metaphor of the contingent human condition, vulnerable alike to doubt, delusion, and the demonic.

34C. G. Jung, "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man," Collected Works, vol. 10, Civilization in Transition, 2d ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 82-84 (originally published 1931).

35Henry A. Green, "Gnosis and Gnosticism: A Study in Methodology," Numen 24 (August 1977): 121.

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Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 1-126Front MatterThe God beyond God: Theology and Mysticism in the Thought of Meister Eckhart [pp. 1 - 19]Problematic Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations of Modern Gnosticism [pp. 20 - 36]Traditional Religion, Modernity, and Unthinkable Thoughts [pp. 37 - 58]Two Phases in Wieman's Thought: Wieman's Concept of the Divine [pp. 59 - 72]Review ArticlesArt, Experience, and Augustinian Intelligence [pp. 73 - 80]Gifts of Grace: Lewalski on English Protestant Poetics [pp. 81 - 87]On Interpreting Kierkegaard [pp. 88 - 93]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 94 - 96]untitled [pp. 96 - 99]untitled [pp. 99 - 101]untitled [pp. 101 - 102]untitled [pp. 102 - 104]untitled [pp. 104 - 106]untitled [pp. 106 - 107]untitled [pp. 108 - 109]untitled [pp. 110 - 111]untitled [pp. 111 - 113]untitled [pp. 113 - 115]untitled [pp. 115 - 117]untitled [pp. 117 - 119]untitled [pp. 119 - 120]untitled [pp. 120 - 122]untitled [pp. 122 - 123]untitled [pp. 123 - 125]untitled [pp. 125 - 126]

Back Matter